Seminar: Communicating
During The Shape of a Practice, this seminar explored the practice of communication as one in flux as means of addressing some of the underlying power structures that continue to shape communicative practices: colonial practices of information storage, algorithmic structures that favor digital storage over human memory, patriarchal conditions that make the voices of dissent invisible, militarized nation-states that censor and penalize that which is seen as threatening, and capitalistic formations that convert people into things. Borrowing from the medical genealogy of “practice,” which involves disarticulation and forensic investigation, the seminar sought to examine the practice of communication in the era of the Anthropocene.
- Case StudyShahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani
The Gadap Sessions
Part of the larger project Karachi LaJamia, this case study explores experiences creating non-hierarchical pedagogical curricula and spaces in Karachi, Pakistan.
Communicating, Education, Indigenous Rights, Landscape, Engagement, Degradation, Community
- Case StudyEla Spalding
Suelo
Ela Spalding’s contribution to The Shape of a Practice looks back at the multidisciplinary residency Suelo, which took place in 2014 in coastal Panama.
Communicating, History, Ecology, Local knowledge, Network, Community
- Case StudyMyung Ae Choi, Buhm Soon Park
Technological DMZ
Research on one of the most important wintering places for cranes that happens to lie in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea.
Case Study, Communicating, Ecology, Human-animal relations, Local knowledge, Species, Agriculture
- Case StudyGilly Karjevsky, Rosario Talevi
Climate Care
Climate Care festival engages with theory and practice at the intersection of climate challenges and ethics of care.
Communicating, Care, Climate change, Architecture, Ethics, Knowledge production, Urbanism, Sustainability
- Case StudyMoritz Roemer
Problematizing Heat
What is the impact of climate change on un-housed populations in Berlin? This case study connects the work by city mission projects to the wider problem of urban heat generation.
Communicating, Urbanism, Climate change, Human-environment relations, Care, Environmental Justice
- Case StudyStudents from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Open Space Planning, TU Berlin
Collaborative Mapping at Westhafen
Can a harbor offer “places of access” to the Anthropocene? This Berlin project sought to find out via methods of collaborative, playful entanglement.
Communicating, Mapping, Landscape, Infrastructure, Speculative, Education, Urban
- Case StudyCourtney Addison, Timothy Neale, Thao Phan
An Anthropogenic Table of Elements
What is elemental to this anthropogenic moment and what elemental forms are yet to emerge?
Communicating, Disciplinarity, Knowledge production, Toxicity, Speculative
- contributionFelipe Castelblanco, Nishant Shah
Interview: Communicating
Seminar moderators Nishant Shah and Felipe Castelblanco reflect on how communicating in the Anthropocene entails making sense of an intellectual and sensorial force.
Communicating, Conversation, Complexity, Epistemology
- contributionImani Jacqueline Brown, Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani, Adania Shibli
Histories of Disintegration
Histories can often be told through the changes in a landscape; about what has changed and come to form, but most of all, what is excluded altogether.
Case Study, Film, Conversation, Climate change, History, Indigenous Rights
- contributionJohannes Bruder, Stéphane Grumbach, Orit Halpern, Olivier Hamant, Sandi Hilal, Karolina Sobecka, Ela Spalding
Between Spaces, between Lines
Some of the most interesting work on the Anthropocene takes place in between places, in between disciplines, and even in between the lines.
Experiment, Case Study, Migration, Climate change, System, Ecology, Economy
- contributionRaphaël Grisey, Gilly Karjevsky, Patricia Reed, Fernando Silva e Silva, Nikiwe Solomon, Ela Spalding, Spółdzielnia Krzak / Krzak Collective, Rosario Talevi, Bouba Touré, Simon Turner, Monique Verdin
Coordinating Practice
The Anthropocene has a coordination problem. This discussion highlights the many challenges of coordinating projects at different scales, both spatially and temporally.
Conversation, Reflection, Field Work, Local knowledge
- contributionMaya Indira Ganesh, Sadie Luetmer, Shana M. griffin
Extracts and Exclusions
How can one negotiate between extraction, decontextualization, and the outright exploitation that could cause unequal flows of knowledge?
Archiving, Knowledge production, Extraction, Violence
- contributionDenise Frazier, Gilly Karjevsky, Jason Ludwig, Tim Schütz, Rebecca Snedeker, Spółdzielnia Krzak / Krzak Collective, Rosario Talevi
Knowing Together
How can we build communities that share knowledge about climate issues, both locally and at the planetary-scale?
Case Study, Conversation, Agriculture, Climate change, Environmental Justice, Race
- contributionSarah Lewison, Swan Parsons, Florian Ruland, Alexandra Toland, Andrew Yang
On the Recuperative Mismanagement of a Cosmopolitan Fish
Closing the opening week of The Shape of a Practice, this meal-at-a-distance brought speakers to the transatlantic kitchen table along with so-called invasive species from the US and Germany.
Storytelling, Conversation, Experiment, History, Ecology, Species
- contributionMyung Ae Choi, Madhushree Kamak, Jahnavi Phalkey
From a Living Exhibition to the DMZ
Space for studying Anthropocene-related changes can occur intentionally, through institutions and other projects, but it can just as easily occur by accident.
Field Work, Case Study, Experiment, Ecology
- contributionMaud Canisius, Xenia Chiaramonte, Myriel Milićević, Thiago da Costa Oliveira
On the Impossibility of Representing a River
There are uncountable ways to look at a river, yet many of them are invisible in today’s cartographic depictions.
Conversation, Water, Urbanism
- Andrius, “Los Angeles Is Painting The Streets White, And There’s A Good Reason Why,” for Demilked, 2017, blog post.
William Goldbloom Bloch, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Rosi Braidotti, WOWMEN!20 Rosi Braidotti on Posthumanism, Kaaitheatre, 2020, video stream.
Peter Dauvergne, AI in the Wild: Sustainability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, 2020.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2015.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions, 2015.
Susan Leigh Star, “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions On Being Allergic to Onions,” Technoscience and the Politics of Interventions, 2007.
Natalie Wynn, ContraPoints, YouTube influencer, video streams.
Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
